CRT still means Can't Really Trust'em?

Happy 2017 everyone.

Not been here for some time and that sort of reflects my general plan over the last year or two to stand back from Waterways politics a bit. On the NABO front I am now proud to be no more than another paid-up member.

I guess if you read this, you already get it, but the fact is most waterways reps are volunteers, doing stuff in their own time and often at their own expense too. The truth is you get little thanks and often lots of hostility when you try to get involved, especially from the armchair trolls and the like. Eventually the 'why do I bother' voice wins out?

Well it's not just that. The forum trolls and the like generally get called out. A much more serious problem  is that in my experience CRT are too often no less incompetent, just as evasive, argumentative and down right difficult to deal with as the old BW, and I think for many of us that is what eventually wears you down.

I was interested to notice that my old friend Allan Richards has parted ways with Narrowboatworld website. Don't know the full ins and outs of that. What did catch my eye was a letter denegrating Alan's habit of using the Freedom of Information site, What do they Know on a regular basis. This caught my eye because it is a small vignette of the issue I touched on above, about the too frequent difficulties many of us experience getting some sort of truthfulness out by CRT.

Allan and many others, myself included, use What do they Know to ask questions of CRT simply because if we do not, they too often obfuscate and evade the question.

Indeed a number of years ago BW used to append all sort of dire warnings to correspondence all but threatinging to sue the recipient if they dared share the information received with others! I have in the past even received such warnings about not telling other memebers of NABO Council what was discussed in meetings with BW even though I was at the meeting with BW to represent NABO! (This directive was ignored and challenged, of course.) It is not therefore surprising that many of those who scrutinise CRT chose to do so in the public domain.

It is also why the most determined people are still challenging CRT in the Civil Courts. The Ravenscroft case is due to be heard this year and even before the hearing CRT have apparently admitted one abuse of process, using Section 8 action for debt recovery.

The point is the old soubriqet - Cant Really Trustem! So many times I and others have caught BW and no CRT saying one thing to one person and something else to another that we have concluded that the only way forward is to ask questions in a way that gets the answers into the public domain.